Elon Musk has offered praise to a rival, reacting with a single word to Google's newest artificial intelligence model. When Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared the launch of Gemini 4 Carbon on X, Musk replied, "Impressive". Pichai acknowledged the comment with a folded-hands emoji.
The reaction stands out because Musk's own AI venture, SpaceXSI, previously known as SpaceXAI, is a direct competitor to Google in the AI space.
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Musk has praised Pichai this way before. In July, when Pichai posted about Google's quarterly results, Musk replied with the very same word.
Google has called Gemini 4 Carbon its most capable model so far. The company is pitching it as a tool for cybersecurity defence and for complex software engineering work that runs over long periods.
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According to Google's official blog, the model can spot flaws in software, check whether those flaws can be exploited and assist in building fixes for them. This could allow security teams to find weak points in their systems and react to threats more quickly.
How It Performed On Benchmarks
Google said the model scored 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, which measures how well a model finds vulnerabilities. It scored 54.8% on ExploitGym, a test of exploitation ability, and 71% on CWE-bench, which assesses how well it patches vulnerabilities.
The company added that on its internal benchmarks, Carbon produced secure code at more than twice the success rate of Gemini 4 Argon, the model that came before it.
It is worth noting that Google itself reported these numbers, and a model that tests well may not perform the same way outside controlled conditions.
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Why Google Is Limiting Access
For now, Google is offering Gemini 4 Carbon only to a select group of cybersecurity defenders under its Fairwind Program. The company plans to expand access to trusted partners in stages, while it continues to test and refine safeguards ahead of a broader launch.
The careful approach highlights a wider concern across the AI industry. A model capable of helping security teams patch flaws could, in the wrong hands, be used to attack systems instead. Rival OpenAI recently held back the release of one of its own models over security concerns.
Gemini 4 Carbon Pricing
Google has set an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens for Carbon, the same as Gemini 4 Argon's launch pricing. The cost is tied to usage, meaning customers are charged for the volume of data the model handles rather than a fixed subscription.
Argon itself was released only two weeks ago.
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